Purple Dynasty wrote:
>
> I've seen both the changelog and the majorchanges listings, but
> neither really provides enough information to figure whether you
> should bother installing a new current build. Perhaps instead of
> deltas, it would be more useful to list checksums or something similar
> to indicate atleast whether any data has changed besides the title of
> the file. Am I correct in my assumption that the zero delta can
> provide a false negative since new code MIGHT be of the same size as
> the data it replaced (and likely WILL since it needs to fill certain
> hardware registers of defined size)?
>
As you've noticed, that page is "dev.cgi". It's specifically intended to
be information relevant (and important) to the developers, not the end
users. The delta is important to us because there's a very strong goal
to keep Rockbox small. This is because the smaller it is, the more music
you can buffer, and the better your sustained-listening battery life.
It's actually very unlikely that changes will have a net zero delta,
because it reflects total RAM usage as well.

As to a checksum, this would simply be different every single time
unless it were a limited checksum, because things like the version
string are compiled in every time, and may change. Meanwhile changes may
happen in other files (for example, plugins) that wouldn't be reflected
from a checksum of the core binary (note: changes to plugins also won't
show up on the delta).